April 12, 1998

BOOKEND / By JONATHAN BLACK

The Cold Mountain of Central Park

rwin plotted his way by Trump Tower, its silhouette a smudge against the nightly rotation of stars, using the brass telescope with the fine optics from Germany. An ancient peddler had told him the smudge was the burning fire of evicted souls, but Irwin put no stock in myth, he had seen too much reality on the western side. His own soul yearned for the east, where perfumed johnny-hock bloomed on humid terraces, and so he stumbled on, a hand pressed to the festering scrape on his hip where he had tumbled into a pothole on Amsterdam Avenue. He had seen men survive worse, men whose entire heads had come disconnected from their bodies and who still shopped for sushi at Fairway and went to readings at Barnes & Noble. But though he had fashioned a poultice of ripe juniper berries and the bark of the Borneo poplar and fastened the contraption with the twined root of huckleberry, still he limped and still the wound festered.

Weak from thirst, he collapsed one night by a great pond, sucking in water until he vomited a thick ribbon of bile, and then he sucked at the black pool again. Sated, he marinated a pigeon wing in the brine from a crushed acorn and he stuck it through with a green twig and roasted the wing until the fire popped and crackled. And when he was done eating he removed the small notebook and sharpened his pencil with the flint that was honed from the brooding rock near the bramble where the Indians had their visions, and he wrote: My Beloved Sara.

They had met many seasons previous at the Temple of Dendur. It was a benefit for the Costume Institute and Sara had sat erect in her plain chair, her chestnut hair tied tight in a bun, her waist cinched in a country gingham, the great billow of underthings lapping about her like a cloud when a storm is threatening over the smear of mountains. So struck was Irwin by her beauty that he could only think to say, Is that a costume from the Institute? and she replied, No, it is from my closet, it was my mother's, she toiled as a seamstress. And then without speaking another word she took his napkin and, plucking a bobby pin from her chestnut hair and a small roll of floss from deep inside her simple purse, she proceeded to make a shirt from the napkin.

He wore the shirt still, a reminder of Sara and her brittle beauty and the strange story she had told him of her father, the Lithuanian, who had died in childbirth -- his wife's. A blister he had borne from home grew to a rancid boil and during his wife's long pregnancy had begun to ooze a blackish pus, which was like foul water imbued with infection. And during the anxious hours of his wife's labor the boil had exploded, releasing a hot torrent -- but Irwin never heard the rest of the story because he had had to excuse himself to throw up. And when he returned to the table Sara was gone.

And so he put away his pencil and cast his eyes east, identifying now the glowing smear of the temple against the starless sky, and he thought of Hoving on his horse and the mounted Montebello, proclaiming the supremacy of art over nature and the start of the conflict. How long ago it seemed now. Irwin could no longer remember what year the battles for turf had begun, the first small encroachment of the Met, the echoing shot from the Museum of Natural History, and then the marched move of the smug Guggenheim that fateful foot, and the terrible response then from the Planetarium. The park in between lay ravaged, pocked with the scorched fields where the enemy had stood within spitting distance, taunting one another with post-modernist ballads as they lobbed their fearful artillery.

Troubled by dreams that were part memory and part salve, he slept fitfully that day and walked all night the next. Ill with hunger, he ate a squirrel he hit with a rock, saving the teeth to trade for glue and using the tail to brush his teeth. The air was heavy with the smell of smoke, which he tracked through stalks of tree toad until he happened upon an old woman, shawl drawn about her shoulders, ruffled cuffs held in supplication.

-- I've seen worse come from the west, she said. You'd best put some dogwood on that scrape.

Her name was Trudi and she beckoned him through the brush and into her house, which looked like nothing so much as an overturned peanut vendor's cart hoisted on husks of hickory. It turned out it was a peanut vendor's cart and she told him this story:

Many years ago she had fallen in love with the peanut vendor, who was a distant cousin, and followed him into the park, where he preached his peanut religion from the band shell, which he said was shaped like a peanut shell. And then one day, stepping from the shell to greet a parishioner, he had tripped and died and she found herself alone in a world she knew little of. She built a house then of peanut shells, extracting the oil from the nuts and using it to lure animals, which she trapped and skinned and traded for pieces of soap. One day she nabbed a possum and she traded that for a pozzle plate and the second gear from a bicycle and a fistful of celery root, which she ground into medicine and sold to an old man who played the most heavenly music on a dog collar. And when she asked where he had learned to play his ethereal tunes he told her this story:

-- Wait, said Irwin, who was confused. Is this the same old man who sold you the soap?

The old woman fingered a strand of his hair in her gnarled fingers and told him soon the thrush would be nesting between his toes.

-- You look like a man who needs a bit of something in his belly, she said. Let me give you what I have.

This she did, boiling a soap soup into which she dropped nuggets of whipsit, skimming the fat with a paddle made from the lashings of splintered subway ties. And while he ate the stew off a shingle, which Trudi had rubbed to a bright polish, she extolled the lowly field mice, the scorned rodents who scurried in such plenitude and were, if one took notice, highly intelligent creatures. Those with a leftward hitch in their tail, said Trudi, could recite Greek and harvest organs, and the pink-eyed females with the grained fur could do prodigious feats of math and broil steak if they were so inclined.

-- It all depends on their mood, said Trudi. There was no telling with field mice.

Irwin thanked her for her insights and pocketed the smooth shingle and struck off east, navigating by the stars and wondering if Sara, too, might be gazing heavenward, and trudging ahead for home he remembered the rough skin inside her simple elbow and thought how much he longed to rest his weary head there.